Frances Widdowson argues academic freedom at stake in court battle with University of Lethbridge over cancelled talk

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“Claims should be asserted on the basis of reason, evidence and logic, not the basis of a prescribed doctrine,” she said. 

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The planned February 2023 event was about how “wokeism” was undermining academic freedom. Widdowson agreed to the talk on the invitation of Paul Viminitz, a professor who the university later fired in 2024. (Viminitz was previously a party to Widdowson’s Court of King’s challenge, and Jonah Pickle, a former student, is currently an applicant). 

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Widdowson has since called on the Alberta government to intervene in her case against University of Lethbridge due to her claims about the threats to academic freedoms at stake, but the government has thus far declined. 

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Elizabeth Harper, spokesperson for Advanced Education Minister Myles McDougall, said the province’s universities are obligated to report on their free speech policies, adding that “the University of Lethbridge has been asked to review their policies to ensure that they support free speech.”

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Matthew Woodley, a lawyer at Reynolds Mirth Richards & Farmer LLP who is representing the University of Lethbridge, was occupied with separate court proceedings on Monday and was unable to schedule an interview, according to his assistant.

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In a statement, University of Lethbridge spokesperson Trevor Kenney said that the same week of the cancelled talk in February 2023, Widdowson led two other lectures at the university that passed without incident. 

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“The University cancelled a room booking for an event involving Frances Widdowson as the result of concerns relating to possible harms raised by members of the University community, including safety risks,” Kenney said. 

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On May 27, 2021, the Kamloops Indian Band, or Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc, claimed that it had located the remains of 215 children — “some as young as three years old” — in an apple orchard at a former residential school site. The claims were based on the results of ground-penetrating radar, which is capable of detecting ground disturbances but does not confirm the presence of bodily remains. 

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The next month, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan said it had found potentially 751 potential unmarked graves at a cemetery near the former Merieval Indian Residential School. (The Cowessess chief emphasized at the time that they were not mass graves, but unmarked ones.) 

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Some cities including Victoria cancelled their Canada Day celebrations that year, and The Canadian Press named the Kamloops “unmarked graves discovery” as its newsmaker of the year. 

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Widdowson said that until the evidence of graves are verified, it is intellectually unhealthy to assert that they do. That is also true for Canada’s First Nations, she said, who deserve to have their many struggles addressed on a foundation of truth. 

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“If we don’t have the truth, we will not be able to figure out the best way to organize society,” she said. “That’s what’s happened to Aboriginal people now, is that they’re being fed a whole bunch of falsehoods which are making it impossible for Aboriginal people to thrive and live full lives in modern society. 

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In December 2021, Mount Royal University, Widdowson’s former employer, terminated her over allegations that a series of tweets she had posted were a form of harassment. In 2024, an arbitrator found that Widdowson’s dismissal was unwarranted and that, despite her controversial views, there had “never been a complaint about the quality or ethics of her scholarship.”

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